With increased reliance on the operation of electronic equipment for day-to-day tasks, as well as the circuits and components within them, it is increasingly important to be able to assess not only the operating state of such equipment, but also if and when such equipment is experiencing degraded operation or is near failure and end of useful life. The ability to have condition based maintenance and prognostic health management capability on electronic systems, in order to monitor operating states, track performance, identify degraded performance and predict useful life is of significant advantage to the military as well as the commercial sector.
The prognostic health management technology typically utilizes both diagnostic and prognostic features to develop health indicators to assess the current health and predict the amount of useful life remaining of an electronic system. An electronic health indicator is a collection of one or more diagnostic features used to determine the overall lifetime (or health) of a system. An electronic health indicator is primarily used to determine the percentage of health remaining, or health index of a system. A prognostic feature is a collection of one or more diagnostic features used to measure the rate of degradation to predict the amount of time left remaining during the useful life of the system, also referred to as remaining useful life.